DVD of the Week: “We Can’t Go Home Again”

During the contraction of Hollywood movie production in the nineteen-sixties that resulted from the rise of television and decline of the studios, many great filmmakers dropped out of the business or were pushed to the margins. One was Nicholas Ray—among the very greatest American filmmakers. When Ray surfaced again, at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton), in 1971, he worked with his students on a movie, “We Can’t Go Home Again,” that differed radically from his earlier films. Since he wasn’t in Hollywood and wasn’t working with a cast or crew from the studios, he didn’t work as directors do there. Rather, he developed an advanced and complex cinematic form to match his personal situation and the troubled times. Putting film images through a video processor, he condensed multiple shots into individual frames; he used multiple exposures, color transformations, shape distortions, and geometric overlays to capture a sense of a mind and a world in turmoil—of a filmmaker and a generation in crisis. Needless to say, “We Can’t Go Home Again” didn’t receive a wide commercial release, or even a limited one. The film screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973 but wasn’t picked up for distribution. Ray shot more footage, tinkered with it for a few more years, and then moved on. He knew the fickleness of the business; the Times critic Vincent Canby visited Ray at Harpur, in 1972, and reported that the director “remembered how Hollywood dinner dates, which had been cancelled after the bad reviews of ‘Johnny Guitar,’ were reinstated when the film became a big money-maker.” The canonization of “We Can’t Go Home Again” is long overdue. Ray died in 1979; the version of the film that was restored and screened in 2011, and that’s now available on DVD, is a reconstruction of the one from 1973.

Sign up to get the best of The New Yorker delivered to your inbox every day